For Freud, dreams were the royal road to the unconscious: through the process of interpretation, the manifest and sometimes bewildering content of dreams can be traced back to the unconscious representations underlying it. But can we understand dreams in another way by considering how the unconscious is structured by our social experiences?This is hypothesis that underlies this highly original book by Bernard Lahire, who argues that dreams can be interpreted sociologically by seein...

In 2008, the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon acquired a painting called The Flight into Egypt which was attributed to the French artist Nicolas Poussin. Thought to have been painted in 1657, the painting had gone missing for more than three centuries. Several versions were rediscovered in the 1980s and one was passed from hand to hand, from a family who had no idea of its value to gallery owners and eventually to the museum. A painting that had been sold as a decorative object in 1986 for aro...